The Conspiracy Against the Human Race (20 page)

9. To laud a writer’s work primarily for its style is the worst affront in a critic’s game book.

See John Updike’s introduction to the paperback edition of Schulz’s Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass, which begins by calling the Polish genius “one of the great writers,” [emphasis not added], so as to artfully withhold from Schulz any real greatness as a writer. Alfred Kazin similarly trivialized Burroughs in a review entitled “He’s just wild about writing.”

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10. If fiction could indeed be so bewitching, you can be sure it would be watchfully regulated or co-opted by the authorities. Laughably, or perhaps not, certain groups of religious citizens, in consort with such institutions as the Catholic Church or the hydra of Islam, have acted as if this were a dangerous possibility. (Why else execute Marguerite Porete, excommunicate Tolstoy, ban J. D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye from certain schools, or put Salman Rushdie on a Muslim hit list for his novel The Satanic Verses?) The machinations of these coalitions are the acme of anchoring as explained by Zapffe, wherein the anchor—in this case one of superstitious faith—is thrust deeply into the heads of believers.

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LIVING HORROR

SICKNESS

Through the translations of Charles Baudelaire and others in France, the works of Edgar Poe promoted life-negation as a literary value as well as a general complexion of mind.

The French tradition relating to Poe's life-negating genius began in the eighteenth-century with such authors as the Marquis de Sade and Sebastian Chamfort and continued into the nineteenth century with the Romantics Alfred de Vigny and Gérard de Nerval and authors of the Symbolist and Decadent movements that included Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam and Maurice Rollinat. While pre-Socratic philosophers and tragedians such as Gorgias and Hegesias of Cyrene formed a pocket of life-negation in the Western world, it was not until the advent of Poe that writers fully expressed this inclination in their works. Take the first two sentences of "Berenice": "MISERY is manifold. The wretchedness of earth is multiform." Who in earlier Western literature would have dared to open a story in this manner except perhaps as an insincere or deceptive utterance?

Poe's authority as a literary great inspired others throughout the world to align themselves with him. In the United States, it was no great leap from Poe's declaration in "Berenice"

to Lovecraft's opening words to "Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family”: "Life is a hideous thing, and from the background of what we know of it peer daemonical hints of truth which sometimes make it a thousandfold more hideous." Poe’s bequest to humanity: the freedom—after thousands of years under the whip of uplifting 92

religions and the tyrannical politics of the positive—to speak as individuals who can no longer lie to themselves about the value, or rather inverse value, of human life.

While writing is a solitary business, few writers are solitaries. Most write as members of society and witnesses of the times in which they live. They respond to the heads around them and put their heads together with theirs. If their works seem bizarre to the general reader, it is because they are writing from within a social circle of bizarre heads.

(Example: participants in literary movements with or without manifestos.) These are not solitaries, who write from inside their own heads and whose writing cannot be understood solely within the compass of a specific place or by the clock of a specific time. Solitary writers come out of nowhere and do not belong anywhere. They are not domesticated or socialized, not as writers. Their subject is not the world about them but the one within them. From story to story or poem to poem, they repeat themselves because all they have to work with are themselves and their dreams, which are strange dreams and often bad dreams. As anyone knows, nothing is more troublesome to communicate than yourself and your dreams, the feelings and visions that have molded you into what you are. So solitaries such as Lovecraft and Poe had their work cut out for them . . . and only them.

The works of both writers have been hooted down for what appears to their critics as bad writing, which translates as meaning that they wrote with an emotional intensity and in a spirit of self-disclosure that violated the rules of detachment to which professional authors largely adhere. True, their prose styles are often high-strung to hysterical. This is not untypical for solitary writers. It is also true that if they had not written as they did, nobody would be reading them today. The possessed quality of their writing is precisely why their works have lasted. The darkest vision of life is best illumined by a dazzling pageantry of language. Neither the lucid exposition of Lovecraft’s travelogues nor the analytical clarity of Poe’s literary criticism explains the endurance of these long-dead artists’ works. That can be accounted for only by the most manic passages of their fiction and poetry as well as by the thoughts and emotions they expressed with such anomalous valor.1

Expressions of the morbid, the macabre, the fantastic, and the feverish are more at home in poetry than in prose. Thus, Poe and Lovecraft, along with every other solitary writer, used lyric devices in their fiction. They did this through various techniques: rhythm, diction, imagery, tone, and so forth. Other writers have done the same, some with a bewitching panache. Splendidly effective as a tool for infusing fiction with the expressiveness of poetry is metaphor. Comprising a fantasia of this device are the works of the twentieth-century Polish writer Bruno Schulz. The cumulative effect Schulz’s prose style is that of a world in delirium, a land where people and objects are the clay of the author’s heated imagination. Here is an example. “Came the yellow days of winter, filled with boredom. The rust-colored earth was covered with a threadbare, meager tablecloth of snow full of holes. There was not enough of it for some of the roofs and so they stood there, black and brown, shingle and thatch, arks containing the sooty expanses of attics—coal-black cathedrals, bristling with ribs of rafters, beams, and spars—the dark lungs of winter winds. Each dawn revealed new chimney stacks and chimney pots which had emerged during the hours of darkness, blown up by the night winds: the black pipes of a devil’s organ.” It should be noted that within this passage, metaphor calls forth the 93

fantastic in the form of those chimney stacks that grow like mushrooms in the night.

Incompatible with the wholesomeness of fancy or fantasy, the fantastic is a decidedly unhealthy mode of expression. And Schulz was one of the great sick men of literature.

Among the words used to describe Schulz’s work is one that turns up occasionally in Lovecraft’s writings. That word is “febrile.” This term suggests a diagnosis as much as a narrative idiom and may be applied to all great literature of nightmare. Schulz’s brain burned with a fever that presented itself as a sumptuous use of metaphor. Dependence on such quantities of this device indicates an interior life without parallel in external reality.

It also illustrates the limits of language to voice sensations and sensitivities of an exceptional or pathological nature.

In healthy discourse, metaphor is an instrument for decorating widely known or effortlessly imaginable experiences. These are made a bit more interesting with a cautious use of metaphorical nuggets, but nothing too involuted or esoteric. As an instance, we might consider the long-expended likening between temperature and psychophysiology. One person is burning with ardor. Another is a cold fish. Everyone knows the conditions to which these statements refer and how we are supposed to understand them. For an overwhelming portion of our species, the healthy and happy majority, metaphor is an extravagance. They can say things such as “I have a headache”

or “I feel a pain in my shoulder” and be clearly understood due to the universality of these experiences. This is the frame within which their lives are circumscribed, and beyond it they are not eager to stray or to admit that they have done so when something unpropitious pushes them out of that frame. Yet there are also those who, often without any choice, have been shoved from the circle or rectangle of a salubrious life. For them, metaphor is the only conveyance they have for getting across the border between them and the rest of humanity. And it is these cases that reveal the breakdown of metaphorical language.

Writers can make themselves understood only to those who already share their experience or can coordinate it with their own. For most of them, there exists in any language a word or two that makes the connection, because billions have undergone identical emotions and sensations in their lives. The same goes for the unexceptional mortal. You tell the doctor that you are nauseated. Even though no instrument exists for measuring nausea, he immediately knows what you mean because he himself has felt nauseated and the symptoms and causes of nausea belong to the knowledge base of medicine. For these reasons, specifics for treating this complaint are obtainable. Now imagine nausea as a debility not recognized by any medical text or institution. How would you explain it to the relevant authorities? You might say that you feel a storm raging in your gut, but what would people make of that comparison who had not felt this sensation themselves and were not trained to recognize it? There could be insinuations that you are a hypochondriac, a not unheard-of reaction to disorders that have not, or not yet, been documented in the Physician’s Desk Reference. Certainly no ready preparation would be available to treat your condition, given its unofficial standing. Perhaps you would be offered some words to placate you or even an elixir that your doctor guesses to be applicable to the dysfunction that you translate as a storm raging in your gut. This approach would be a hit-or-miss affair of the sort that is familiar to every person taking 94

pharmaceuticals for depression. And since nausea, like depression, does not normally incapacitate its sufferers, you would be sent out into the world to carry on as if nothing were wrong with you and to live among those who would look at you strangely the moment you spoke of a storm raging in your gut or used another metaphor you thought might convey your lonely sickness. Perhaps you might take to literature and compose works to ventilate how your nausea has caused you to view human existence. If you wrote engagingly enough, you might be published and those who also knew what it meant to feel nauseated would understand what you were saying in a way no others could. This is the plight of the sick writer. For Schulz, substitute “febrility” for “nausea”

and you may understand why he has only a sprinkling of readers and why those who do read his works celebrate him more often for his prose style than for his vision of a world that is a nightmare of ever-mutating forms. Naturally, Schulz failed to produce a body of writings that fabulate pretexts for survival and reproduction. No one would wish to generate a new creature in the world of Schulz’s metaphors, obscure as they will always remain to those who are not in alliance with his febrile vision.2

DEPRESSION

In “The Last Messiah,” Zapffe indicates four broad methods (isolation, anchoring, distraction, and sublimation) that we employ to insulate ourselves from the horrors brought on by consciousness. None of these are infallible for all mortals at all times.

Those who are untalented in self-deception are especially at risk for a breakdown in the machinery. One such breakdown is depression, which is fascinating both as a disease and an existential drama. (The Swedish writer Jens Bjørneboe wrote that “he who hasn't experienced a full depression alone and over a long period of time—he is a child.”

Bjørneboe’s bilious discharge is more bombast than immutable truth, but it does have at least a smidgen of validity.) Ranging across a continuum of experience that may become trying in private practice, varieties of depression are clear-cut within the psychiatric literature for convenience sake. The statistically prevailing form of this disease is

“atypical” depression. But whatever family name has been given to a case of depression, it has an objective in common with all its kind: to sabotage the network of emotions you had come to identify as the composition of yourself. It is then you discover that your “old self” is not the substantial and inviolable thing you thought it was, nor was the rest of your “old” reality.

What organization and sense our lives seem to have—the florid symptomology that makes this or that game appear to be worth the candle—is the work of emotion. Without it, there is no sense of organization, no sense of sense. By asphyxiating or deranging the emotional phenomenon, depression dissolves the latticework of you and your life.

Emotion, in union with memory, is the substrate for the illusion of self and the illusory substance and properties we see, or think we see, in the world. As do the contradictory doctrines of world religions, emotions roll over one another all the time for lack of a substructure upon which to erect anything consistent, anything “real,” in the long run.

Nevertheless, there they are—either weak and fleeting or so intense that it may seem that something of an absolute nature must underlie their experience. Ask any couple who believe their love will never die, a vital fiction that for a time puts blinders on one’s consciousness of the human tragedy.

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Among the drawbacks of consciousness is that it exacerbates all necessary sufferings and creates unnecessary ones, such as the fear of death.3 To the pain of depression, which might otherwise be experienced as a set of unpleasing physical sensations, consciousness adds desperation as sufferers wonder how long it will last (oftentimes for life), how bad it will get (possibly total incapacitation), and, in general, what will become of them. Since not everyone who suffers from depression has what it takes to take their own lives—ask Gloria Beatty—they come to the following realization: they had better get better or die trying, because the rest of the world does not run on depression time—pain time—but conducts its business on happy time, whether or not that happiness is honestly felt or is pure pretense. To adapt the words of the thirtieth President of the United States, “The business of life is business.” Hence, those who aspire to occupy the top positions in this world tend to paint a rosy picture of how things will be under their proprietorship and, against all indications to the contrary, will continue to do so once they are in power.